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The core problem of SO was the the goal of it (and what made it great) is very much in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want." The original ide

by hobs 1y ago

The core problem of SO was the the goal of it (and what made it great) is very much in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want." The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly to make sure it was useful and up to date (which pretty much failed until recently, until its probably far too late) - this core tenet is something the moderators take seriously, and people using the site as questioners (not searchers) absolutely hate. You can see they are trying to experiment (again probably too late) with how to make question asking easier, more friendly, etc - but that sort of cuts against the core original goals of SO and that's why the mods and the users seemed to be always in tension.

gilleain 1y ago
Agreed. Some other points of tension in Stack Exchanges: 1) People want to ask homework questions (_eg_ on Biology, Chemistry, etc). I understand why that is not allowed, but that doesn't change people's desire to 'just have an answer, now!'. I guess that AI could really take over this niche. 2) Others want to ask very open-ended 'discussion' questions that require back-and-forth to get to the answer, which may be on the edge of known research. While I do understand why people get frustrated about these things, as you point out - this is not what SO (and SEs) are 'for'.
esafak 1y ago
This is an important problem. But most people are readers; that moderation is what made the site a valuable resource. Without it, they would have had to build a powerful search engine. Instead, they did it the old fashioned way, without ML.
zdragnar 1y ago
I don't think this is charitable enough to the user's complaints, or even the person you are responding to. If the moderation was effective and limited, people would ultimately be fine with it. What people don't like is having a question closed as "duplicate" even though what it supposedly duplicates is very different, or any of the other myriad complaints. The same story goes for Wikipedia. Moderators have an agenda, act in frequently erroneous ways, and are actively hostile to criticism.
- hobs 1y ago
  I don't even consider what the user asks - simply that it was rejected and it was a question they wanted to ask - hence "whatever they wanted", and while I agree SO's moderation is overly burdensome (and was a mod myself once more than a decade ago) I don't agree that moderation that's effective and limited having users being "ultimately fine with it" - it totally depends on which users you ask.
barrkel 1y ago
> The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly This is not true as I recall. On Joel and Jeff's podcast, Joel in particular was in favour of having lots of variants of the same question answered repeatedly. His rationale was that if people didn't find the golden original question, there was a reason for that (e.g. it's not a real duplicate, or it's a different frame of thinking about the problem shared by other people), and adding the supposed duplicate would mean that other people who search for it - and would similarly fail to find the golden original - would land on the supposed duplicate. Net win. But this was in tension with cheap karma farmers. SO was structured as a points economy, but in any case anything with points rewards motivates some people to play the game of collecting points. A cheap way of farming points is to ask trivial questions then answer them yourself, or participate in an implicit network of people asking and answering trivial questions. How do you cut that out? Have canonical versions of the trivial questions, redirect people to them while asking, and motivate deduplication.
- shagie 1y ago
  That tension existed. https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ > Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. The emphasis on "good" is in the original. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-launches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling. --- And then, go to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th... I would draw your attention to its history and the original version: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 and the action taken on September 17th, 2011. https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions
palata 1y ago
> in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want." As I said, I strongly disagree with the idea that my questions were unfit for StackOverflow. Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Hell, they closed some of those as duplicate even though I posted both the question and the answer, and the answer was completely different from the one they were pointing to. This is not "I want to ask whatever questions I want". It's bad moderation.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Please feel free to show concrete examples, and I'd be happy to try to explain the reasoning.
  - palata 1y ago
    Deal. Say I ask "How to do X in settings.gradle?" and it is closed as a duplicate to "How to do X in build.gradle?". I know how to do X in build.gradle, I know it is not the same as doing X in settings.gradle (even if it's is twice the same X), and I know how to do X in settings.gradle (because I just had a need and found a solution without the help of StackOverflow). So I post an answer right away. Can you explain the reasoning, or do you need it more concrete because you're absolutely sure you know better? Because what's clear to me is that those (because it required multiple votes) who closed it as duplicate have no clue how it works. They obviously stopped at "X == X, it's a duplicate". At some point I got into the habit of adding notes like "Note: it is not a duplicate of A because [...] and it is not a duplicate of B because [...]", which honestly made the question worse for those who actually understand it (just for the sake of pleasing those who would close it as duplicate). Spoiler: they closed it as a duplicate of A. But stay happy in your world where you know everything, I'm not coming back anyway.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      To "show a concrete example" I would need a question ID. (As I've explained in other posts, deletion is probably not a problem; deletion on Stack Overflow is normally "soft", and I have the reputation needed to see those posts.) I'm not familiar with Gradle (I think that's a Java build system?), but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.

by hobs 1y ago

gilleain 1y ago

Agreed. Some other points of tension in Stack Exchanges: 1) People want to ask homework questions (_eg_ on Biology, Chemistry, etc). I understand why that is not allowed, but that doesn't change people's desire to 'just have an answer, now!'. I guess that AI could really take over this niche. 2) Others want to ask very open-ended 'discussion' questions that require back-and-forth to get to the answer, which may be on the edge of known research. While I do understand why people get frustrated about these things, as you point out - this is not what SO (and SEs) are 'for'.

esafak 1y ago

This is an important problem. But most people are readers; that moderation is what made the site a valuable resource. Without it, they would have had to build a powerful search engine. Instead, they did it the old fashioned way, without ML.

zdragnar 1y ago

I don't think this is charitable enough to the user's complaints, or even the person you are responding to. If the moderation was effective and limited, people would ultimately be fine with it. What people don't like is having a question closed as "duplicate" even though what it supposedly duplicates is very different, or any of the other myriad complaints. The same story goes for Wikipedia. Moderators have an agenda, act in frequently erroneous ways, and are actively hostile to criticism.

hobs 1y ago
I don't even consider what the user asks - simply that it was rejected and it was a question they wanted to ask - hence "whatever they wanted", and while I agree SO's moderation is overly burdensome (and was a mod myself once more than a decade ago) I don't agree that moderation that's effective and limited having users being "ultimately fine with it" - it totally depends on which users you ask.

barrkel 1y ago

> The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly This is not true as I recall. On Joel and Jeff's podcast, Joel in particular was in favour of having lots of variants of the same question answered repeatedly. His rationale was that if people didn't find the golden original question, there was a reason for that (e.g. it's not a real duplicate, or it's a different frame of thinking about the problem shared by other people), and adding the supposed duplicate would mean that other people who search for it - and would similarly fail to find the golden original - would land on the supposed duplicate. Net win. But this was in tension with cheap karma farmers. SO was structured as a points economy, but in any case anything with points rewards motivates some people to play the game of collecting points. A cheap way of farming points is to ask trivial questions then answer them yourself, or participate in an implicit network of people asking and answering trivial questions. How do you cut that out? Have canonical versions of the trivial questions, redirect people to them while asking, and motivate deduplication.

shagie 1y ago
That tension existed. https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ > Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. The emphasis on "good" is in the original. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-launches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling. --- And then, go to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th... I would draw your attention to its history and the original version: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 and the action taken on September 17th, 2011. https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions

palata 1y ago

> in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want." As I said, I strongly disagree with the idea that my questions were unfit for StackOverflow. Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Hell, they closed some of those as duplicate even though I posted both the question and the answer, and the answer was completely different from the one they were pointing to. This is not "I want to ask whatever questions I want". It's bad moderation.

zahlman 1y ago
> Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Please feel free to show concrete examples, and I'd be happy to try to explain the reasoning.
- palata 1y ago
  Deal. Say I ask "How to do X in settings.gradle?" and it is closed as a duplicate to "How to do X in build.gradle?". I know how to do X in build.gradle, I know it is not the same as doing X in settings.gradle (even if it's is twice the same X), and I know how to do X in settings.gradle (because I just had a need and found a solution without the help of StackOverflow). So I post an answer right away. Can you explain the reasoning, or do you need it more concrete because you're absolutely sure you know better? Because what's clear to me is that those (because it required multiple votes) who closed it as duplicate have no clue how it works. They obviously stopped at "X == X, it's a duplicate". At some point I got into the habit of adding notes like "Note: it is not a duplicate of A because [...] and it is not a duplicate of B because [...]", which honestly made the question worse for those who actually understand it (just for the sake of pleasing those who would close it as duplicate). Spoiler: they closed it as a duplicate of A. But stay happy in your world where you know everything, I'm not coming back anyway.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    To "show a concrete example" I would need a question ID. (As I've explained in other posts, deletion is probably not a problem; deletion on Stack Overflow is normally "soft", and I have the reputation needed to see those posts.) I'm not familiar with Gradle (I think that's a Java build system?), but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.